Film composer Ennio Morricone: I’ll Never Work With Tarantino Again

The 84-year-old conductor, who has worked with the “Django Unchained” director on four films, says he uses music “without coherence.”

Ennio Morricone, the prolific Italian composer and conductor who has written many of the most recognizable film scores in history, says he will never again work with director Quentin Tarantinobecause he “places music in his films without coherence.”

Morricone’s work most recently appeared in Tarantino’s Django Unchained, the homage to the Spaghetti Western genre Morricone help popularize in the 1960s with classics including The Good The Bad and the Ugly (1966) and A Fistful of Dollars (1964), both directed by Sergio Leone. Morricone also wrote most of the award-winning soundtrack for Leone’s epic Once Upon a Time in America.

The Django Unchanged soundtrack included Morricone’s “Ancora Qui,” sung by Elisa Toffoli, along with three short Morricone instrumental pieces. Morricone and Tarantino actively worked together on Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s 2009 reinterpretation of the end of World War II, and on both installments of the Kill Bill franchise. But it’ll never happen again, according to the 84-year-old Morricone, who has written music for more than 500 films.

“I wouldn’t like to work with him again, on anything,” Morricone told students in a music, film and television class at Rome’s LUISS University, according to Italian media reports Friday. “He said last year he wanted to work with me again ever since Inglourious Basterds, but I told him I couldn’t, because he didn’t give me enough time. So he just used a song I had written previously.”

Tarantino is frustrating to work with, Morricone said, observing that the two-time Oscar winner “places music in his films without coherence” and “you can’t do anything with someone like that.” Morricone said he saw Django Unchained but was not impressed: “To tell the truth, I didn’t care for it,” he said. “Too much blood.”

Morricone’s credits list includes films with iconic directors on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Europeans Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, horror master Dario Argento, Pedro Almodovar, Giuseppe Tornatore and Sergio Corbucci, the director of the original Django film, as well as Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, Brian De Palma and Barry Levinson from Hollywood.

After receiving five Oscar nominations for Best Musical Score between 1979 and 2001, Morricone was given an honorary Oscar in 2007, for lifetime achievement. He has also won nine David di Donatello awards, Italy’s highest film honors.